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Beginnings

The religious realm of the Vedas is centered on the proper performance of ritual sacrifice, which, essentially, involves the offering something of value—an animal or food—in order to receive the favor of the gods; there are Vedic rituals intended to gain wealth, sons, protection, and abundant crops.

The ritual priests of the Vedas were a group known as the Brahmins. They were entrusted with the sacred texts and with the performance of the rituals. Sometime after 1000 B.C.E., some of these priests began to ask whether there might not be more than this ritual world of exchange in which the "payoff" of religious action was largely material wellbeing. Some began to reject the rituals and their material trappings. They renounced the material and social world, and focused instead on asceticism and meditation. Gradually a new body of philosophically-oriented texts, the Upanishads—sometimes referred to as Vedanta, the end (or completion) of the Vedas—began to emerge.

Unlike the Vedic world of ritual exchange between humans and gods, the Upanishads present a philosophically speculative worldview. They put forward the idea that the material world is not, in fact, "real," but only an illusion that is created by ignorance. What is real is an abstract divine principle, Brahman. The Upanishads focused on how to free oneself from the bonds of material attachments, and thereby attain a state of oneness with Brahman.

List of "principal" Upanishads (there are over 100 others)

Aitareya

Brhadaranyaka

Taittiriya

Chandogya

Kena

Isa

Svetasvatara

Katha

Mundaka

Mandukya

Mandukya

What is sometimes called "classical" (or "Epic") Hinduism emerges sometime after the Upanishads. In this period, which begins around 500 B.C.E., the major gods and goddesses of Hinduism—Vishnu, Shiva, Krishna, Parvati, Lakshmi—develop their "personalities" through a vast corpus of myths. Innumerable new gods and goddesses emerge, as do a multitude of ritual— many based on the earlier Vedas—and forms of veneration. Devotional traditions also emerge, in which the strictly ordered world of sacrifice is supplanted by loving devotion to individual gods and goddesses.

Early periods of Hinduism

Indus Valley Civilization

2500-1500 BCE

Vedic Civilization

1500-500 BCE

Rigvedic period

1500-1000 BCE

Brahmanism

1000-500 BCE

Epic period after

500 BCE

Hinduism is a perpetually evolving collection of an astounding array of philosophical and ritual and devotional traditions. There is no founder, and although historians may attempt to assign an historical "beginning," really there is no moment of origin. Indeed, Hindus often refer to their religion as "sanatana dharma"—the timeless, eternal truth.

Study Questions:1. Why is hard to pinpoint the start and founders of Hinduism? 2. What are some possible explanations of its origin? 3. Who were the devas? 4. What are the Vedas, and what is their purpose? 5. What is the relationship of the Upanishads to the Vedas?